The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  Fantina was quiet, at her father’s side, now and then running off to examine some bump or chase some chafing cricket, back and forth as if fluttering on the end of a kite string in his hands until the moment came that they had expected and he burst out, ‘You’re still here, you should be …’ and he wagged a hand at both his daughters and sent them home. Fantina resisted. He said, to humour her, ‘I’ll cut my business short, I’ll come back early. We’ll go for a walk, you, me, your sisters, while your mother’s making dinner. We’ll pick snail flowers.’

  ‘Will there be any tonight?’ she asked, looking up at the flawless sky.

  Davide tapped a finger to his forehead, between his brows, and said, ‘My weather eye sees showers today.’

  She beamed, turned and was off, back home. She overtook Lucia idling and came through the arch into the courtyard to collapse, in a pretence of puffing disarray from her outing in the garnering heat, until her mother brought her a glass of milk and told her to find her sisters in the lamp room. Fantina drank, collected her bendy limbs together and entered the house. Behind her, her mother was saying, ‘Don’t forget the gateposts, the byre door, or the arch over the entrance, the Madonnina of the Kneading Board above my bed and the other little Madonna by the cistern. No one likes to be left out. And say a prayer, just a little one, everyone likes to be remembered with a word, here and there. The Mother of God, you know, is just like every mother, a kindness doesn’t take any time, and you never know how the Lord will reward you.’ Fantina knew the list and her mother’s injunctions by heart.

  You can still hear her voice, with its mixture of imperiousness and sympathy, sometimes, when you’re knitting and counting the stitches in your mother tongue, or making a salad dressing, and the scent of the olive oil rises from the mixing bowl, as it rose from the tapered spout of the can in the warm summer nights as you helped your sisters fill the lamps in the lamp room at the farmhouse near Dolmetta, by the sea in Ninfania.

  2

  LONDON, 1985

  YOU NEVER KNEW Tommaso Talvi, as he vanished from Rupe at the time of the events that were to prove, in the end, the death of your father. No news of him filtered through either; he might as well never have been, except for the splinters of metal which lodged in your lost father’s flesh and slowly worked their way into his bloodstream and travelled round, discharging their load of poison over years of sickness. They journeyed at the sadist’s lingering pace, through the branching florets of his brain, like powdered pigment seeping into damp cloth in tiny starbursts, until they caused the final thrombosis, the haemorrhage of the brain that killed him. He was poisoned by the lead, some said. Papà San commented, ‘That was how the Roman Empire ended – lead in the water.’

  Small pieces of Talvi’s story remained in you too, and circulated: he’d been friends with Davide at primary school, the Pittagora family had done the boy some kindnesses; later, when Tommaso returned to Rupe a soldier, he developed a certain reputation: his talk was wild, he was full of schemes, and many felt presentiments of unease in his company.

  Yet these were only fragments. For a long time, in the same way as the lead swam tranquilly and invisibly in your father’s bloodstream, the character – no, the very existence – of Talvi occupied your thoughts hardly at all. For one thing, he headed the list of proscribed family memories. For another, you could only fantasticate his image. After all, you were born eleven years after Tommaso Talvi disappeared.

  When you read recently that the mortal remains – in Italian, the salme, a kind of feminine version of the psalms (as if death could turn a body into prayer, into song) – that these mortal remains of local soldiers who had fought for the patria in Africa, in order to found the new Roman Empire, and in Europe during the First World War, and again, later, in Ethiopia, had been returned at last to Ninfania, you fancied that Talvi was among them. You looked at the photograph of the mass grave in the newspaper cutting a friend had sent you. Its heading read, ‘A New Sacred Shrine to the Fallen Overseas.’ You imagined then the blobby faces of the 74,850 men who the article said had been laid to rest in it, alongside mementoes of their campaigns, mustard gas canisters, helmets and insignia, letters and photographs, weapons. Contemporary relics, new holy bones. Over half of them had been assembled, limb by limb, then bagged, and labelled for reinterment so that, more than fifty years later, the bereaved could pray that their lost loved ones might at last rest in peace. In everlasting peace. As if on the Last Day, the graves in Libya, in Ethiopia, in Somalia, and in Albania, on the Western Front and in the Alps, and on the plateaux around Madrid, had cracked and exhaled their handfuls of dust and bone.

  The other half, the remaining thirty thousand of the dead, had lost their names, the article continued. They had lain too long exposed. Not enough was left of them to find out who they were; people in bits like litter. The most specific and inventive of painters could not have filled in different faces of these youths for their shrine. Like those thousands of anonymous murdered virgins, the legendary crowd of martyrs who fall beside St Ursula, they receded to infinity in an imagined throng of the dead: so many differences can’t be seized by the mind, but only evened out, as if woven in a repeating pattern on a single scalloped cope, haloes overlapping like fishscales, hands identically folded. ‘It all comes to the same in the end,’ you murmured. ‘It’s only life that needs differences.’ A whole mausoleum lay under the single rubric ‘Unknown’: a cenotaph the size of a routine urban cemetery.

  You felt pity, of course, that Tommaso Talvi must have gone down in that mud of mingled bodies, that he and his story could not be pulled out of it, not altogether. He’d lost his name, and with his name, his tracks, the print of his foot and the mark of his hand. But you also felt some kind of justice had been served, for it was family lore that he had been to blame.

  From The Duel

  RUPE, 1909

  Talvi was the next tallest boy in the class, and walked beside Davide at the back of the crocodile the teacher formed of her charges. In their blue check pinafores, with floppy black artists’ bows at their necks, with bare knees scraped and gouged and black hairs beginning to show on their legs, both Davide and Talvi had looked so ill-assorted in the eleven-year-olds’ class that the teacher took pity on the young giants and allowed them to wear long trousers. The alliance between the boys had grown; they were put side by side at the twin desk on the same bench at the back of the form so that their long necks and precocious growth would not obstruct their classmates’ view of the board. They would walk home together at lunchtime, and Nunzia often invited her son’s friend to sit down with them at their midday meal; Tommaso’s family did not gather at home at noon in the manner of the south. His father stayed behind, in the Post Office where he clerked, and sent a boy out to the square with an order. He was from Trieste, and Tommaso’s mother from Modena: sent down south, they still kept to their different ways.

  Tommaso did not show gratitude for the hot bread dipped in oil and salt, the sausage and cheese or the boiled eggs and olives Nunzia would hand him. But when his mother observed afterwards, ‘Aaah! Lack of education passes from generation to generation,’ Davide sprang to his friend’s defence: ‘Why should he crawl to us like a peasant? Bow and scrape before we’ll let a drop of something fall from our table? Tommaso’s got his pride too. How would you feel, Mamma, if every day I had nothing to eat unless someone felt sorry for me and I then had to go down on my knees and thank them?’ Davide flushed easily, and Nunzia nodded at the heat glowing in his cheeks, glad that, like his father, Davide could blaze at the wrongs others suffered.

  Tommaso had uncommon eyes, neither blue nor grey, but rather pond-green, with feathery black outer rims to the irises. Like the blanched eyes of old fieldhands who have stayed too long in the sun, they were also slightly protruding, and their glassiness seemed to be reflected in the colour and texture of his skin. It was smooth, and turned a creamy coffee colour in the sun, like a palomino horse rather than the deep bay of most Ninfanians.r />
  Davide was fascinated by his friend’s peculiar appearance, the long undernourished limbs and the glaucous eyes, but he was aware that Tommaso inspired repugnance, even fear in others. His gaze alarmed them. Nunzia noted too the boy’s large red hands, which seemed to grow bigger from month to month. They suggested to her a donkey’s clumsy lubriciousness, and she would find herself shuddering, and then have to scold herself for her recoil. He was only a child, after all, she told herself.

  Yet she continued to dislike the boys’ friendship, and her struggle to be fair made her uncharacteristically stiff in Tommaso’s company; the conflict in her inspired a struggle in her son too, as he fought to maintain his alliance in the face of his mother’s disapproval. It was wounding to him, however covert.

  The boys’ comradeship, which had begun with exchanges of penny whistles, loans of a pen, a wiper, a piece of blotting paper, or a surreptitious twist of tobacco, developed into exchanges of confidences and speculations. They’d borrow Davide’s father’s hunting rifle and take turns to shoot in the fields; Davide, the shyer one, whooped the loudest when the shots flew home. When there was little game, they’d set up targets on piles of stones or a stretch of wall and practise. Once they extracted some paraffin from a lamp at school: the flare from the can when they hit it and it sailed into the air streaking blue fire gave them more excitement than the rockets which formed the climax of the saint’s day in the summer.

  Although Tommaso would shrug at Davide’s sensitivity, he was a good audience, and Davide could reveal to him much he would have died rather than tell another. ‘I was in a city, it was big. Naples, Rome, big –’ Davide once told him, ‘And the sea was all around, it was glittering on the edge of my sight. It was very hot in the streets where I was moving and my feet hurt in their shoes, I was wearing my school shoes, and they were laced tight. I undid them and then I was walking in them loose without socks and blisters burned my skin yet the ground was too hot – I tried it – to take them off altogether.’

  ‘Come to the point, for God’s sake!’

  Talvi always wanted to get to the exciting bit; Davide on the other hand tried to catch the feel of the dream and draw little pieces out of the forgetfulness, then reassemble them to conjure himself back into the dream’s mood, to find himself wrapped in its sweetness or its terror again as if by a sudden gust in the morning when Sabina, the maid at home, opened all the windows and the doors in the first cool light to bring a cross-breeze into the house.

  ‘I was in a corridor, it was in a mountainside, and it was night-time. Only here and there, a ray of light like a blade pierced the darkness, and made a pattern on the ground, dark, light, dark, light, and as I walked down the rhythm of the light became a drumbeat ahead of me, daroom daroom, like you hear at a funeral and I was scared, I wanted, really wanted, to go on, because I knew that at the end, where the drum was sounding was something … something exceptional, beautiful!’

  Talvi groaned, ‘“Something exceptional, beautiful.” Listen to him: a hole on two legs with the feel of raw liver and that’s what he calls it.’

  Davide faltered. But Talvi grinned, and gave Davide a nudge to proceed. ‘There’s nothing much more really: I never found the drummer. The sound stopped and I was beside the water, it was transparent like your hand when you put it against a candle flame, except it was dark green, and I heard a woman’s voice, and she came up to me from behind, I could feel her approach rather than see her face, and she leaned over my shoulder, her hair rustling against my cheek,’ – he put his hand up to his cheek as if he could still feel it – ‘And she let her hand travel down to my body softly, just about to here,’ he pointed to his stomach. ‘And she opened a door, it came away very easily, everything inside was beautifully arranged, my spinal column and the vertebrae all white and in proper sequence, and pink organs like big roses on either side, and she put her hand in and …’ Davide laughed. ‘I woke up and I was all wet on my stomach of course. The usual milky sticky stuff.’

  Talvi looked disappointed: ‘I’m glad I don’t get my thrills the way you do.’ He slapped his groin. ‘Good, meaty legs, something to hold on to round the middle, and, wham, Talvi’s there, at the ready, standing to attention!’

  ‘You never…’ Then, catching Tommaso’s look of mischief, Davide groaned. An instant later, he prodded the boy, where he was lying in the shade beside him. ‘Come on, it’s your turn. I went first.’

  They were lying under an almond tree, in an orchard planted with olives and almond side by side where the last, mean outer dwellings of the town joined the countryside in an untidy margin of compost heaps, animal pens and laundry lines. It was the beginning of summer, the grapes visible like glass beads on the vines, the fruit trees’ leaves curling pink with the usual blight, after the blossom of early spring. ‘They’ve found a big villa,’ Tommaso began telling Davide, arranging himself on his elbow to look him in the eye, ‘on the land of the Marchese, up in the hills near Dragonara, by the gorge.’ He gestured with his hand behind him into the blue mist of the horizon. There had been some digging recently. And they had found some pictures inside one of the villa’s rooms, a wall-to-wall frieze, the longest and the brightest and even the oldest anyone had ever seen.

  ‘They’re all of women.’ Tommaso bent closer to Davide, his pale eyes alight.

  Caterina was nine when Talvi came to the small-holding Davide’s grandparents rented in the country. She was playing outdoors with their brother, Franco, dropping stones, into the cistern, plop, dippity-dop, plop, dippity-dop, trying to keep up a rhythm together, now and then she darted from the cistern to the shade of the olives where she hunted for suitable chunky pebbles for her game. Because she was a little girl, her skirt was short and her bare ankles, scratched white here and there in her sunburn, could be seen under the hem. Davide saw his sister as his friend saw her, for the first time, and felt a surge of pride.

  ‘She’ll break a few hearts,’ was on the tip of his tongue to say, with a kind of glow in his breast from association with such fatal sprigs on his family tree; but he bit the words back when he saw the avidity of Talvi’s look.

  Soon afterwards, in town one day during the school term, Tommaso stayed to eat with them, and Davide found himself aware that Tommaso wasn’t wolfing his food as usual, but was watchfully keeping pace with Caterina’s steady, discreet manner of eating, as if he had noticed that the child had already acquired womanly ways and he was refining his own to appeal to her. Or so it seemed to Davide’s eyes.

  Rosalba, Davide’s other sister, two years older than Caterina, was helping her mother clean up the meal, wiping the plates with sand and cinders to save water (it was early in the summer of the great drought). She carried off the big wheel of goats’ cheese and the earthenware jar of olives in oil and spices and the flat round loaf, domed like the apses of Ninfania’s cathedrals, and stored them one by one in the dark cool depths of the vaults behind the kitchen, where the sun’s heat never reached and the chill kept the flies at bay. But she was paying attention to the talk passing to and fro between her brother and her mother about his friend, and now and then made a soft sound in her mouth, of assent or dissent, but always encouraging them to carry on, as if she were the audience they were addressing. Sometimes she spoke aloud, to set them on. She wanted to hear about Talvi; she was filled with curiosity about anyone her brother named. He could talk, circulate, explore outside, in a way forbidden to her. He could bring her news.

  Rosalba was already heavy, with breasts like a big plump pillow that weighed down her small stature and made her movements seem laboured; her suffering at the burden of her own flesh dragged her lines down even more and loaded her every movement with apology. ‘My darling little plump pigeon,’ her mother would say, sitting across from Rosa as they peeled vegetables or chopped together. ‘You are good, you have a strong, loving, helpful spirit and that is a much rarer thing in life than a beautiful outward form, and you will see, there is justice, the Saviour knows how you are ins
ide, he can see all that sweetness there, and he will bring you your reward.’

  But Rosalba cried out behind her plump, accommodating features. She would rather have given all her goodness, all her helpfulness, all her lovingness for just two more centimetres in height and four less round her middle and at least ten less round her bubs and a face like the statue of the Madonna in the church, smooth and pink with no hair at all anywhere, not on her lip or near her ears or under the curve of her eyebrows or between them. Oh, she’d like to smash that sweet thoughtful Saviour her mother believed in, because he liked people to be good and he had given her goodness, and she wanted, wanted so badly, wanted so the pain of it flashed in her belly like the ache of her menses, to be pretty like her sister. But her mother smoothed her hair on her head, and touched her, held her hand, and said, ‘Little plump pigeon.’

  Rosalba heaped up all her goodness into a big tall fortified wall for she did not want to hurt her mother by bursting out, ‘Don’t call me that! Call me your little lion cub, your little lamb, your little kitten, like you call Cati …’ Her mother was going on, ‘It’s much easier to be happy in this life without prettiness. The beauties go to the bad, you only have to think of what happened to Serafina’ – and she waved her hands and rolled her eyes to heaven, ‘her poor mother, what is she to do with her, two babies already, and both of them by the Lord knows who? They will have to leave, live in Riba, pretend something happened to Serafina’s man but will people believe them? No. The stories follow them, galloping behind them like the horseman Death, clip clop clip clop, always keeping them in sight, always reminding them of her shame. And she’s the loveliest creature you’ve ever laid eyes on …’